Thought for Thursday, 17th Week of Ordinary Time

Jesus said to the disciples:
“The Kingdom of heaven is like a net thrown into the sea,
which collects fish of every kind.
When it is full they haul it ashore
and sit down to put what is good into buckets.
What is bad they throw away.
Thus it will be at the end of the age.
The angels will go out and separate the wicked from the righteous
and throw them into the fiery furnace,
where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.”

“Do you understand all these things?”
They answered, “Yes.”
And he replied,
“Then every scribe who has been instructed in the Kingdom of heaven
is like the head of a household who brings from his storeroom
both the new and the old.”
When Jesus finished these parables, he went away from there.

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These are not the pleasant kind of parables that we like to hear from Jesus. Often we only want to hear Jesus talk about heaven and His love and mercy. We can get uncomfortable when He talks about hell.

Today, we hear Jesus saying that the Kingdom of Heaven is like a net thrown into the sea. Some of the fish that are caught are good and others are bad. The bad fish, representing the wicked, are thrown into the “fiery furnace”. The good ones, the righteous, will rejoice with the angels in heaven.

Is there a “hell”? Of course there is! Jesus himself tells us that there will be “wailing and grinding of teeth”. That doesn’t sound pleasant. But it is not Jesus who casts us into hell. He gives us the choice. There is a fork in the road. We can either choose to follow Jesus or not. There are eternal consequences to that choice. So if we do not choose Jesus, we are choosing hell. We are choosing to separate ourselves from God.

Scripture says that we should “work out our salvation in fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12). This should not paralyze us. To me, it motivates me every day to love Christ to love others. It takes a daily commitment to follow Christ. Matthew Kelly says that every thought, word or action leads us closer to Christ or away from Christ. If we make that regular commitment to follow Christ in all that we think, say and do, we have nothing to fear.

Christ is not in heaven waiting for us to “mess up”. He wants to spend all eternity with each of us. Jesus is not in heaven waiting for us to sin and then strike us down. No, that is not who God is. We are created by a God who loves us. In fact, God loves us so much that He has given us free will. Love is a product of our free will. We have the choice to love or not to love. We have the choice to follow God or not.

But He left us these sobering parables – there are consequences to our actions. The choice is up to us – which will we choose? Make a morning offering each day when you wake up. Offer to God everything that you will think, say and do throughout the day. And then reflect on your day each night. How well did you give God everything that day?